the misfit west

Tag: family estrangement

  • no, never

    “maybe it started way back when you would talk about sex with a 15 year old girl and tell her all about your sex life. maybe it started when you took money from my family after our father died. maybe it started when the only time I could stomach talking to you was high on meth. you have a whole pile of people you’ve thrown out and I’ll gladly be in that pile than continue to deal with your perversion. something very very wrong.“

    I was homeless in Gillette, Wyoming during a year when overdoses were killing around 109,000 people. The streets get characterized in a lot of ways but I can tell you plainly that most of the time it is boring. I had a room in a complex with a bar, a gambling area, a restaurant, and a laundromat next door, nine hundred dollars. The first two nights came as a voucher from victim services after a boyfriend pulled a sawed off shotgun in my face. I laughed at that one and saw opportunity instead. The rest of the stay was funded by my Uncle Warren, who was feeling generous after a scare of his own involving his heart. He had a big one.

    After my uncle agreed to pay I felt a little safer, and I knew I couldn’t live in the National 9 forever, but it was actually really safe. There were stories of guns and I never saw any, and even with money and drugs coming in and out of the room it was safe to me because it was my own. Different characters would come through day and night and I watched. They weren’t violent, not even particularly mean, but they had all given up. When someone gives up, they go fast. One girl, huffing fentanyl smoke, falling asleep mid sentence and then waking like a hummingbird, buzzing about her kids, her job. I didn’t ascertain much about their backgrounds because the pain they were in was a right now kind of thing. I became witness in those months.

    When my own pain wasn’t right in my face I would think about conversations with my family and the first time I left. I was very keen on getting certain questions answered and they would offer the information freely, albeit in two words. Did your dad beat you?

    No.

    My aunt: no
    My uncle on the same side: no
    My brother: no, but almost, fuck you don’t talk to me about dad
    My sister: no
    My mother: no.
    My uncle: no. Never.

    Christmas, 2024, and I was two months into converting to Catholicism after studying it for years and going to daily mass. Still learning when to stand and when to kneel. Immigrants came up before the ham was cold and I said something about how God calls us to take care of them and I said it meekly, I remember that I said it meekly. My aunt’s husband said there had been a gang thing in Aurora, it had been all over the news, they had taken over an apartment building. I said I lived in Centennial and went to Aurora all the time and hadn’t seen any gangs. He said they ripped out a woman’s fingernails. I said I was glad the man who might be the next pope was welcoming to immigrants. He said the lineage was wrong.

    The fingernails came from a city councilwoman at a press conference and not from the police chief standing next to her, who said only that it fell into the category of torture for him, and the two people bound and beaten in that apartment were Venezuelan immigrants themselves. I didn’t know any of that at the table. I only knew that every time I said a thing, the thing I had to answer for moved. That was what disgusted me, not the position, he had no position, he had a series of exits, so the man is the pope but we don’t have to listen to him because of the lineage, and I sat there thinking that is the whole message of the book, that is the entire book. I left.

    In the height of my addiction, right before I left Colorado for Wyoming, I started calling relatives. Drunk, high, losing my mind, I found it helped to call people I hadn’t talked to in forever, and strangely I was probably better company then because I wouldn’t talk about myself. There wasn’t much to say and if I said exactly what was happening I risked losing more people. I called mostly my dad’s side. A story started to come up.

    The two brothers and the sister of my father described it the same way. Their dad had gotten home and it became known that he was going to beat David, my dad. I couldn’t tell you what sin deserved this punishment and I can’t speak exactly to the punishment because they all left, too. My aunt described grabbing my uncle by the wrist and walking him out of the house and as far down the block as she could get. They still heard his screams. My uncle describes it the same way and he even ventured a guess that David was taking the beating for him. Whatever it was for, my uncle remembers walking far far away and hearing it. All three children, decades later, recounting the sound of my father getting beaten.

    Fall of 2022, my thirty ninth birthday, alone. A knock at the door scared me and it was a man with flowers. I texted my aunt, I got your flowers, thank you so much, I’ve got the plague or something and I’m really really sick, do you think you could give me a ride to the emergency room. Silence. No text back. Nothing about the flowers and nothing about my pain. I took it in stride. A few years later, when she brings it up, she says they didn’t know what to do because they thought it was my mental health and that I was suicidal or something. I didn’t have a car. Who the fuck was I supposed to ask?

    2001, the kitchen, evening, the light already gone out of the glass. I got mouthy. In my father’s house you did not get mouthy. My back was to the sliding door that went out to the porch, the twin of the one in the parlor, the one he fell out of years later and died. He hit me open handed, back and forth, and the sound of it was flat and domestic, like something being tenderized. I tasted it before I understood it. Afterward I had to peel my lips off the wire. He put me on the floor. He took my hair in his fist and walked me across the linoleum to the top of the stairs. I got the bannister. My mother stood right behind him and told him to keep going. Then he stopped. They went somewhere and the house got quiet the way a field gets quiet. I called until somebody said come. Her mother let me stay until the sheriff came and told me I’d be going to the crisis shelter for a few days. I rode up front next to his gun. Then rehab.

    No.

    I was working at Pronghorn Elementary. They called my name over the PA and I walked to the office and my sister said Dad had been in an accident, that he had fallen out of the sliding glass door. He was still alive when I got to the hospital. Then they sent the chaplain in, and I looked at him and knew, and I went to go throw up. We drove to Casper. I lost my mother and sister somewhere in the garage and got turned around and ended up alone in an elevator when my great uncle called, and that is where I heard it. Then I called my grandmother and told her. I was twenty five. We had been talking about two years by then, which was new, and it was going well, which was newer. Whatever we were doing, we were in the middle of it. I forgave him. It took about a decade and then he was dead a year and a half into the good part. My aunt is alive. Her husband is alive. They have had all the time in the world.

    For two years I went to mass before I ever asked to be received. I liked the kneeling. I liked that my knees hurt. I liked the water at the door and the way your hand knows before you do. I liked that it asked me for something daily and never once asked what I had done to deserve asking. Then I sat at a table with two people who had been Christians their whole lives and watched a man lawyer his way out of the plainest instruction in the book, and I was the only one there who thought any of it was binding. I don’t go anymore. I am in the pile now. I went out the door and down the block. I can hear it from here.

  • dogs stay free

    Folks don’t check the emergency contact line. A name and a number go in the box and the box goes in a file and everyone involved agrees that this means somebody comes.

    The man on mine does not know my middle name. He does not know what month I was born. If I died in a parking lot in some town I was only passing through, a nurse would call a man who would have to guess at the date they wanted for the form, and I have thought about that guess more than is good for a person.

    My father spent his working life under Gillette in a swamp that stopped being a swamp about sixty million years ago. It was pressed flat and stayed, seam after seam, one of them a hundred and ten feet thick. Men take it out and it goes east on trains and gets burned so that buildings can be lit.

    He wore the same pocket shirt and the same Wranglers every day of my childhood, different color, same shirt. In fall he’d bake his boots in the oven to waterproof them and I’d smell it from my room and come up the stairs thinking he was making something.

    He died outside, on a concrete pad, in December, alone. The paper on the front page said he plunged. My family says he fell. I had a friend go clean the pad before we got back from the hospital and she did her best but the cat found it anyway under the tarp. I poured bleach water over that concrete bucket after bucket while the cat kept coming back.

    One spring I rented a U-Haul because a moving truck was cheaper than a car and my dog and I rattled all the way down south. Vinyl bench, no cruise, one station out of Cheyenne that came and went with the terrain. Behind my head an empty cargo box caught every seam in the road and handed it back doubled so the whole rig rang like a dropped pan for six hours at a stretch.

    Angel had her chin on my leg the entire way and would not take it off. I could feel her jaw tighten at every joint in the pavement. I was driving myself from Gillette down to Fort Collins in an attempt to get a handle of the substances that had stained my country soul yellow.

    Laramie is not on that road. Laramie is a turn you make, west on eighty, up over the hill and past the rocks with the wind coming across at you the whole way, and I made it, because that was as close as I could get to somebody I knew.

    The Motel 6 there is on East Plaza Lane, close enough to the interstate that eighty never really quits, and the freight comes through on top of that all night, not coal, just everything else the country is moving while you’re trying to sleep.

    Rooms were under seventy dollars. Dogs stay free, which I knew, which is exactly why I picked it. Behind the building there’s a pool with no water in it and a chain link fence around the pool, and the wind moves grit across the bottom of it, which up here it does constantly.

    I called him from the lot and asked him to put a room on his card. He told me the charge would post with the name of the motel and the name of the town sitting right there on the statement, and his wife would see the line.

    There’s a reason I could call him though. Just because he didn’t know my birthday didn’t equate to unfamiliarity. His father beat him. He caught a felony for meth. His best friend died in front of him in a car wreck.

    He got out of all of it and did the same work I do now, sits with people coming off the same things we came off. He understood my situation completely. Better than anyone else in my phone. He knew exactly what was going to happen to me that night and he was not confused about the stakes for one second.

    He owns four houses. I used to say that like an accusation. What I think now is that a man who came up the way he came up builds walls, and he builds a lot of them. My name in his records is a door in one of those walls, and he could not open it. Not for me. Not for seventy dollars. Not because he didn’t want to. So we established the terms. Cash and food, yes. Name on paper, no.

    My sister had been telling me for years that men are not friends with women, that he only wanted to sleep with me, that there is no such thing. I never believed her. Sitting in that lot at seven thousand feet with the heater off to save gas and the dog breathing on my leg, running the math on the last person I had, I started to.

    The Ranger is two miles north on Third, a liquor store bolted onto the side of a bar, open till two, pool table, shuffleboard, and I have never in my life been so glad to see a lit sign. There was a kid in there, and I mean a kid, twenty-two maybe, with a face that told me he had weather of his own coming. He listened to about ninety seconds of my story and paid for a room. He did not know my middle name either. There was no form anywhere on this earth with this guarantee and he did it anyway.

    Down in Fort Collins my buddy met me at a barbecue place off the highway, bought me nachos, and put a hundred dollars in my hand. He’d gone and gotten it in cash so it wouldn’t have a name on it either. I want to be honest about what I did with it, which is that I spent every dollar on a man at a bar that same night, or on the idea of him, and got pulled over trying to drive him home.

    I slept in the back of the U-Haul behind an expensive hotel, because a moving truck behind an expensive hotel looks like somebody moving and nobody calls anybody, and behind a gas station it reads as a problem. I backed into the dark end of the lot where the lights don’t reach and pulled the door down and Angel got the blanket.

    Through the glass I could see the lobby lit up the way they keep them all night, a hundred beds in there, made up, empty, waiting on nobody, and every bulb in it burning something a man like my father took out of the ground.

    That spring I was sitting at my mother’s house waiting to get into my own, and I had told her something true about my brother, and he came down the stairs and said, you are dead to me. He got the whole sentence out clean. He’d been holding onto it.

    My mother killed herself that fall. She was in the house about a day before anybody knew. My brother found her.

    My sister called and I knew before she had it all the way out of her mouth and what came out of me was goddamnit, Mom.

    I cried until I could smell the tears in my own sinuses and the air went sanitized, the way it smells inside a building with a pool, and that is what her death smells like to me and I stopped trying to explain that to people a long time ago.

    All three of us believe it was our fault. It is the only thing this family has ever agreed on and not one of us has ever had the courage to talk about it.

    Two of them now, both alone, both unsaid. We are a family that does not come, and we are a family that does not say so, and I was raised in that family and then I needed somebody to come.

    In May my buddy’s heart stopped and he lived. Nobody called me. There was no reason anybody would, I am not on a single form of his. He told me himself, after, long enough after that it had turned into a story he was tired of telling. I don’t know whether his wife knows my last name. He goes to a great deal of trouble to keep me out of the record. He is also the best I have got.

    A friend came and stayed one night. She hugged me at the door and I found out what I had turned into. Feral. But I loved, love, these two people. This friend a felon, too, somehow in all that won’t say lies all the love and courage and care that a form can’t capture in a box.

    I live in Laramie now, about a mile from a lot where I couldn’t get a room for seventy dollars. The pool is still empty. The sign out front is still out. Sixty million years ago there was standing water where my family is from. Things grew in it and died in it and got pressed down under everything that came after until they became something people could burn to keep warm.

    My father spent thirty years bringing it back to the surface so strangers would have light and heat, and I don’t think he ever imagined his daughter would one day be sitting in a motel parking lot, trying to figure out who would show up for her.

    I only learned recently that the emergency contact line has no force. It isn’t a medical power of attorney. It doesn’t give anyone authority to make decisions or sign forms. It’s just the state’s best guess about who might come. The form asks who to notify. The real question is who comes.